ve and liver and black. It was as though
the sick earth had burst into foul pustules; mildew and lichen mottled
the walls, and with that filthy crop Death sprang also from the
water-soaked earth. Men died, and women and children, the baron of the
castle, the franklin on the farm, the monk in the abbey and the villein
in his wattle-and-daub cottage. All breathed the same polluted reek and
all died the same death of corruption. Of those who were stricken none
recovered, and the illness was ever the same--gross boils, raving, and
the black blotches which gave its name to the disease. All through the
winter the dead rotted by the wayside for want of some one to bury them.
In many a village no single man was left alive. Then at last the spring
came with sunshine and health and lightness and laughter--the greenest,
sweetest, tenderest spring that England had ever known--but only half
of England could know it. The other half had passed away with the great
purple cloud.

Yet it was there in that stream of death, in that reek of corruption,
that the brighter and freer England was born. There in that dark hour
the first streak of the new dawn was seen. For in no way save by a great
upheaval and change could the nation break away from that iron feudal
system which held her limbs. But now it was a new country which came out
from that year of death. The barons were dead in swaths. No high turret
nor cunning moat could keep out that black commoner who struck them
down.

Oppressive laws slackened for want of those who could enforce them, and
once slackened could never be enforced again. The laborer would be a
slave no longer. The bondsman snapped his shackles. There was much to do
and few left to do it. Therefore the few should be freemen, name their
own price, and work where and for whom they would. It was the black
death which cleared the way for that great rising thirty years later
which left the English peasant the freest of his class in Europe.

But there were few so far-sighted that they could see that here, as
ever, good was coming out of evil. At the moment misery and ruin were
brought into every family. The dead cattle, the ungarnered crops, the
untilled lands--every spring of wealth had dried up at the same moment.
Those who were rich became poor; but those who were poor already, and
especially those who were poor with the burden of gentility upon their
shoulders, found themselves in a perilous state. All through England